Strava

The Strava Files

Everyone agrees that when Kim Flint crashed, he was chasing a record on Strava, the social fitness site that has rewritten the etiquette of cycling and shattered its traditions, transformed countless lives for the better, and fostered as many friendships (and rivalries). What almost no one seems to fully comprehend is exactly who—or what—caused Flint’s death.

The other original, even more crucial component (“the center of the experience,” in Horvath’s words) is Strava’s tracking of your performance on segments of popular routes. “It could be a climb,” Horvath explains, “or it could be a sprint. We compare your time on that segment to the times of everyone who’s ridden it before and uploaded it to Strava.” Thus, if you bicycle up Tunnel Road in Berkeley, Strava automatically ranks you on a leaderboard among (as of this writing) 3,682 other members who have done it, with the first-place finisher designated the King of the Mountain, or KOM (plus the Queen of the Mountain, for women), and with runners-up identified by numbered trophies. Even if you’re nowhere near the top, you win a PR icon if you achieve a personal record.

“It creates a sense of motivation,” says Horvath. “Can I get better relative to my own fastest time, or relative to other people­ I know? There’s a sense of friendly­ competition among the people you’re connected with.”

Membership is free, but for a fee you can upgrade to Premium status, which allows you to filter your data. “If I’m ranked four-hundredth out of twelve hundred, it may not be so relevant,” says Horvath, “but I can also ask: How do I compare to the people I’m following? Or: How do I compare to people in my age group? Or my weight class?” Since you enter such personal information (as well as details such as the weight of your bike) in your user profile when you sign up, even if you don’t use a power meter Strava can calculate how much effort it took to haul yourself from Point A to Point B at X miles per hour. If you have a heart-rate monitor, it can also display a “suffer score.”

The company doesn’t release membership numbers, but says that participation grew by a factor of 15 to 20 in its first year and 8 to 10 in each of the three years that have followed. With apps available for iPhone and Android, as well as the ability to import information from Garmin and other GPS units, membership extends to 221 countries and seven continents. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in just four years of existence, Strava has transformed the cycling world, winning praise and devotion for its motivational capability, how it aids and simplifies performance analysis, its usefulness for discovering new routes, and help with forging new friendships. Meanwhile, the experience of competing, formerly obtainable only by showing up on a starting line with other flesh-and-blood riders, can be had in private.

Like any other game-changing innovation, this one has its critics and pitfalls. Chief among these is, indeed, the charge of gamification: Strava-besotted cyclists engage in personal time trials when­ever they mount their bikes, and with so many users familiar with the locations of popular segments, formerly civil training rides now explode at predictable—if intangible—points. (“Hundreds of invisible city-limits signs all over the place!” a user named Kristofer Wagner exulted. “Pure awesomeness!”) Like teammates in a traditional race, riders sometimes work together for the sake of snagging segment wins, and individuals plot strategies to optimize their Strava numbers—for example, purposely starting a climb off the rear of a group then advancing to the middle or front so that, even if the group summits together, the late starter has the fastest time by the end (a practice known as Stravasniping). Strava has enabled mountain bikers to easily discover and publicize illegal trails and has led to accusations that hikers and equestrians are being endangered by gonzo downhillers in pursuit of records. So deeply has Strava become embedded in the sport that, in cycling parlance, its name has now become a verb—and overdependence on it has, correspondingly, inspired some colorful nouns, including “Stravaddict” and ­“Stravasshole”—the latter denoting, according to Kris Thompson on the Boulder/Denver area website 303cycling.com, “an individual Strava-ing at the expense of common courtesy.”

Wayne Lumpkin, owner of Spot Brand Bicycles in Golden, Colorado, and a longtime icon of the sport, summed up a common sentiment when he told Bicycle Retailer, “People call it social media, but I call it anti-social media.”

FOR AN ANALYTICAL person like Kim Flint, Strava proved irresistible. He became such an avid user that he got in touch with Strava’s engineers, helping them work out bugs in their system for establishing segments. Over time, he created 39 segments himself. One might be tempted to suggest that, as a devoted looper, he embraced Strava because he enjoyed playing alone—but in fact, as the company foresaw, he also reached out to local members whose times were close to his.

“Hey, you’re on Strava right?” Flint tweeted to an Oakland cyclist named Steve Shores in October 2009. “The guy who beats me by 30 seconds on every damn climb in the East Bay?”

“Yeah but you are close,” Shores replied.

“We should do a ride sometime,” Flint answered. “I’m having a lot of fun with Strava, they’re doing a good job on that.”

Like compatible online daters, Shores and Flint soon started riding together in real life. In early December they climbed 4,000-foot Mount Hamilton amid snow flurries, an achievement that Shores celebrated by tweeting: “Welcome to the top 5 club! You did an awesome ride today!”

“Yeah, you too! Are you looking at the leaderboard? I’m #1 best climb of the week?”